Xavier Perez Sala, Sergio Escalera, Cecilio Angulo, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). A survey on model based approaches for 2D and 3D visual human pose recovery. SENS - Sensors, 14(3), 4189–4210.
Abstract: Human Pose Recovery has been studied in the field of Computer Vision for the last 40 years. Several approaches have been reported, and significant improvements have been obtained in both data representation and model design. However, the problem of Human Pose Recovery in uncontrolled environments is far from being solved. In this paper, we define a general taxonomy to group model based approaches for Human Pose Recovery, which is composed of five main modules: appearance, viewpoint, spatial relations, temporal consistence, and behavior. Subsequently, a methodological comparison is performed following the proposed taxonomy, evaluating current SoA approaches in the aforementioned five group categories. As a result of this comparison, we discuss the main advantages and drawbacks of the reviewed literature.
Keywords: human pose recovery; human body modelling; behavior analysis; computer vision
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Frederic Sampedro, Anna Domenech, & Sergio Escalera. (2014). Obtaining quantitative global tumoral state indicators based on whole-body PET/CT scans: A breast cancer case study. NMC - Nuclear Medicine Communications, 35(4), 362–371.
Abstract: Objectives: In this work we address the need for the computation of quantitative global tumoral state indicators from oncological whole-body PET/computed tomography scans. The combination of such indicators with other oncological information such as tumor markers or biopsy results would prove useful in oncological decision-making scenarios.
Materials and methods: From an ordering of 100 breast cancer patients on the basis of oncological state through visual analysis by a consensus of nuclear medicine specialists, a set of numerical indicators computed from image analysis of the PET/computed tomography scan is presented, which attempts to summarize a patient’s oncological state in a quantitative manner taking into consideration the total tumor volume, aggressiveness, and spread.
Results: Results obtained by comparative analysis of the proposed indicators with respect to the experts’ evaluation show up to 87% Pearson’s correlation coefficient when providing expert-guided PET metabolic tumor volume segmentation and 64% correlation when using completely automatic image analysis techniques.
Conclusion: Global quantitative tumor information obtained by whole-body PET/CT image analysis can prove useful in clinical nuclear medicine settings and oncological decision-making scenarios. The completely automatic computation of such indicators would improve its impact as time efficiency and specialist independence would be achieved.
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Jorge Bernal, Fernando Vilariño, F. Javier Sanchez, M. Arnold, Anarta Ghosh, & Gerard Lacey. (2014). Experts vs Novices: Applying Eye-tracking Methodologies in Colonoscopy Video Screening for Polyp Search. In 2014 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (pp. 223–226).
Abstract: We present in this paper a novel study aiming at identifying the differences in visual search patterns between physicians of diverse levels of expertise during the screening of colonoscopy videos. Physicians were clustered into two groups -experts and novices- according to the number of procedures performed, and fixations were captured by an eye-tracker device during the task of polyp search in different video sequences. These fixations were integrated into heat maps, one for each cluster. The obtained maps were validated over a ground truth consisting of a mask of the polyp, and the comparison between experts and novices was performed by using metrics such as reaction time, dwelling time and energy concentration ratio. Experimental results show a statistically significant difference between experts and novices, and the obtained maps show to be a useful tool for the characterisation of the behaviour of each group.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, & Michael Felsberg. (2014). Scale Coding Bag-of-Words for Action Recognition. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 1514–1519).
Abstract: Recognizing human actions in still images is a challenging problem in computer vision due to significant amount of scale, illumination and pose variation. Given the bounding box of a person both at training and test time, the task is to classify the action associated with each bounding box in an image.
Most state-of-the-art methods use the bag-of-words paradigm for action recognition. The bag-of-words framework employing a dense multi-scale grid sampling strategy is the de facto standard for feature detection. This results in a scale invariant image representation where all the features at multiple-scales are binned in a single histogram. We argue that such a scale invariant
strategy is sub-optimal since it ignores the multi-scale information
available with each bounding box of a person.
This paper investigates alternative approaches to scale coding for action recognition in still images. We encode multi-scale information explicitly in three different histograms for small, medium and large scale visual-words. Our first approach exploits multi-scale information with respect to the image size. In our second approach, we encode multi-scale information relative to the size of the bounding box of a person instance. In each approach, the multi-scale histograms are then concatenated into a single representation for action classification. We validate our approaches on the Willow dataset which contains seven action categories: interacting with computer, photography, playing music,
riding bike, riding horse, running and walking. Our results clearly suggest that the proposed scale coding approaches outperform the conventional scale invariant technique. Moreover, we show that our approach obtains promising results compared to more complex state-of-the-art methods.
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Q. Xue, Laura Igual, A. Berenguel, M. Guerrieri, & L. Garrido. (2014). Active Contour Segmentation with Affine Coordinate-Based Parametrization. In 9th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (Vol. 1, pp. 5–14).
Abstract: In this paper, we present a new framework for image segmentation based on parametrized active contours. The contour and the points of the image space are parametrized using a set of reduced control points that have to form a closed polygon in two dimensional problems and a closed surface in three dimensional problems. By moving the control points, the active contour evolves. We use mean value coordinates as the parametrization tool for the interface, which allows to parametrize any point of the space, inside or outside the closed polygon
or surface. Region-based energies such as the one proposed by Chan and Vese can be easily implemented in both two and three dimensional segmentation problems. We show the usefulness of our approach with several experiments.
Keywords: Active Contours; Affine Coordinates; Mean Value Coordinates
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David Masip, Michael S. North, Alexander Todorov, & Daniel N. Osherson. (2014). Automated Prediction of Preferences Using Facial Expressions. Plos - PloS one, 9(2), e87434.
Abstract: We introduce a computer vision problem from social cognition, namely, the automated detection of attitudes from a person's spontaneous facial expressions. To illustrate the challenges, we introduce two simple algorithms designed to predict observers’ preferences between images (e.g., of celebrities) based on covert videos of the observers’ faces. The two algorithms are almost as accurate as human judges performing the same task but nonetheless far from perfect. Our approach is to locate facial landmarks, then predict preference on the basis of their temporal dynamics. The database contains 768 videos involving four different kinds of preferences. We make it publically available.
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Jiaolong Xu, Sebastian Ramos, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2014). Incremental Domain Adaptation of Deformable Part-based Models. In Tony Andrew and Pridmore M. and F. Valstar (Ed.), 25th British Machine Vision Conference. BMVA Press.
Abstract: Nowadays, classifiers play a core role in many computer vision tasks. The underlying assumption for learning classifiers is that the training set and the deployment environment (testing) follow the same probability distribution regarding the features used by the classifiers. However, in practice, there are different reasons that can break this constancy assumption. Accordingly, reusing existing classifiers by adapting them from the previous training environment (source domain) to the new testing one (target domain)
is an approach with increasing acceptance in the computer vision community. In this paper we focus on the domain adaptation of deformable part-based models (DPMs) for object detection. In particular, we focus on a relatively unexplored scenario, i.e. incremental domain adaptation for object detection assuming weak-labeling. Therefore, our algorithm is ready to improve existing source-oriented DPM-based detectors as soon as a little amount of labeled target-domain training data is available, and keeps improving as more of such data arrives in a continuous fashion. For achieving this, we follow a multiple
instance learning (MIL) paradigm that operates in an incremental per-image basis. As proof of concept, we address the challenging scenario of adapting a DPM-based pedestrian detector trained with synthetic pedestrians to operate in real-world scenarios. The obtained results show that our incremental adaptive models obtain equally good accuracy results as the batch learned models, while being more flexible for handling continuously arriving target-domain data.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection; Part-based models; Domain Adaptation
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Sergio Vera, Debora Gil, & Miguel Angel Gonzalez Ballester. (2014). Anatomical parameterization for volumetric meshing of the liver. In SPIE – Medical Imaging (Vol. 9036).
Abstract: A coordinate system describing the interior of organs is a powerful tool for a systematic localization of injured tissue. If the same coordinate values are assigned to specific anatomical landmarks, the coordinate system allows integration of data across different medical image modalities. Harmonic mappings have been used to produce parametric coordinate systems over the surface of anatomical shapes, given their flexibility to set values
at specific locations through boundary conditions. However, most of the existing implementations in medical imaging restrict to either anatomical surfaces, or the depth coordinate with boundary conditions is given at sites
of limited geometric diversity. In this paper we present a method for anatomical volumetric parameterization that extends current harmonic parameterizations to the interior anatomy using information provided by the
volume medial surface. We have applied the methodology to define a common reference system for the liver shape and functional anatomy. This reference system sets a solid base for creating anatomical models of the patient’s liver, and allows comparing livers from several patients in a common framework of reference.
Keywords: Coordinate System; Anatomy Modeling; Parameterization
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Enric Marti, Antoni Gurgui, Debora Gil, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Jaume Rocarias, & Ferran Poveda. (2014). ABP on line: Seguimiento, estregas y evaluación en aprendizaje basado en proyectos.
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Carles Sanchez, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Patricia Marquez, Enric Marti, Jaume Rocarias, & Debora Gil. (2014). Evaluación automática de prácticas en Moodle para el aprendizaje autónomo en Ingenierías.
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David Fernandez, R.Manmatha, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2014). Sequential Word Spotting in Historical Handwritten Documents. In 11th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis and Systems (pp. 101–105).
Abstract: In this work we present a handwritten word spotting approach that takes advantage of the a priori known order of appearance of the query words. Given an ordered sequence of query word instances, the proposed approach performs a
sequence alignment with the words in the target collection. Although the alignment is quite sparse, i.e. the number of words in the database is higher than the query set, the improvement in the overall performance is sensitively higher than isolated word spotting. As application dataset, we use a collection of handwritten marriage licenses taking advantage of the ordered
index pages of family names.
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Monica Piñol. (2014). Reinforcement Learning of Visual Descriptors for Object Recognition (Ricardo Toledo, & Angel Sappa, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: The human visual system is able to recognize the object in an image even if the object is partially occluded, from various points of view, in different colors, or with independence of the distance to the object. To do this, the eye obtains an image and extracts features that are sent to the brain, and then, in the brain the object is recognized. In computer vision, the object recognition branch tries to learns from the human visual system behaviour to achieve its goal. Hence, an algorithm is used to identify representative features of the scene (detection), then another algorithm is used to describe these points (descriptor) and finally the extracted information is used for classifying the object in the scene. The selection of this set of algorithms is a very complicated task and thus, a very active research field. In this thesis we are focused on the selection/learning of the best descriptor for a given image. In the state of the art there are several descriptors but we do not know how to choose the best descriptor because depends on scenes that we will use (dataset) and the algorithm chosen to do the classification. We propose a framework based on reinforcement learning and bag of features to choose the best descriptor according to the given image. The system can analyse the behaviour of different learning algorithms and descriptor sets. Furthermore the proposed framework for improving the classification/recognition ratio can be used with minor changes in other computer vision fields, such as video retrieval.
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Anjan Dutta. (2014). Inexact Subgraph Matching Applied to Symbol Spotting in Graphical Documents (Josep Llados, & Umapada Pal, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: There is a resurgence in the use of structural approaches in the usual object recognition and retrieval problem. Graph theory, in particular, graph matching plays a relevant role in that. Specifically, the detection of an object (or a part of that) in an image in terms of structural features can be formulated as a subgraph matching. Subgraph matching is a challenging task. Specially due to the presence of outliers most of the graph matching algorithms do not perform well in subgraph matching scenario. Also exact subgraph isomorphism has proven to be an NP-complete problem. So naturally, in graph matching community, there are lot of efforts addressing the problem of subgraph matching within suboptimal bound. Most of them work with approximate algorithms that try to get an inexact solution in estimated way. In addition, usual recognition must cope with distortion. Inexact graph matching consists in finding the best isomorphism under a similarity measure. Theoretically this thesis proposes algorithms for solving subgraph matching in an approximate and inexact way.
We consider the symbol spotting problem on graphical documents or line drawings from application point of view. This is a well known problem in the graphics recognition community. It can be further applied for indexing and classification of documents based on their contents. The structural nature of this kind of documents easily motivates one for giving a graph based representation. So the symbol spotting problem on graphical documents can be considered as a subgraph matching problem. The main challenges in this application domain is the noise and distortions that might come during the usage, digitalization and raster to vector conversion of those documents. Apart from that computer vision nowadays is not any more confined within a limited number of images. So dealing a huge number of images with graph based method is a further challenge.
In this thesis, on one hand, we have worked on efficient and robust graph representation to cope with the noise and distortions coming from documents. On the other hand, we have worked on different graph based methods and framework to solve the subgraph matching problem in a better approximated way, which can also deal with considerable number of images. Firstly, we propose a symbol spotting method by hashing serialized subgraphs. Graph serialization allows to create factorized substructures such as graph paths, which can be organized in hash tables depending on the structural similarities of the serialized subgraphs. The involvement of hashing techniques helps to reduce the search space substantially and speeds up the spotting procedure. Secondly, we introduce contextual similarities based on the walk based propagation on tensor product graph. These contextual similarities involve higher order information and more reliable than pairwise similarities. We use these higher order similarities to formulate subgraph matching as a node and edge selection problem in the tensor product graph. Thirdly, we propose near convex grouping to form near convex region adjacency graph which eliminates the limitations of traditional region adjacency graph representation for graphic recognition. Fourthly, we propose a hierarchical graph representation by simplifying/correcting the structural errors to create a hierarchical graph of the base graph. Later these hierarchical graph structures are matched with some graph matching methods. Apart from that, in this thesis we have provided an overall experimental comparison of all the methods and some of the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, some dataset models have also been proposed.
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Pedro Martins, Paulo Carvalho, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Context-aware features and robust image representations. JVCIR - Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 25(2), 339–348.
Abstract: Local image features are often used to efficiently represent image content. The limited number of types of features that a local feature extractor responds to might be insufficient to provide a robust image representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a context-aware feature extraction formulated under an information theoretic framework. The algorithm does not respond to a specific type of features; the idea is to retrieve complementary features which are relevant within the image context. We empirically validate the method by investigating the repeatability, the completeness, and the complementarity of context-aware features on standard benchmarks. In a comparison with strictly local features, we show that our context-aware features produce more robust image representations. Furthermore, we study the complementarity between strictly local features and context-aware ones to produce an even more robust representation.
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Simeon Petkov, Xavier Carrillo, Petia Radeva, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Diaphragm border detection in coronary X-ray angiographies: New method and applications. CMIG - Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, 38(4), 296–305.
Abstract: X-ray angiography is widely used in cardiac disease diagnosis during or prior to intravascular interventions. The diaphragm motion and the heart beating induce gray-level changes, which are one of the main obstacles in quantitative analysis of myocardial perfusion. In this paper we focus on detecting the diaphragm border in both single images or whole X-ray angiography sequences. We show that the proposed method outperforms state of the art approaches. We extend a previous publicly available data set, adding new ground truth data. We also compose another set of more challenging images, thus having two separate data sets of increasing difficulty. Finally, we show three applications of our method: (1) a strategy to reduce false positives in vessel enhanced images; (2) a digital diaphragm removal algorithm; (3) an improvement in Myocardial Blush Grade semi-automatic estimation.
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